26 Nov Best Fitness Watches of 2025

Some even offer a small smattering of smart features, like NFC https://gymstogo.com/5-components-of-health-related-fitness-why-is-it-important/ payments and onboard music storage. ScanWatch Light, ScanWatch 2, and ScanWatch Nova from Withings provide detailed insights into your sleep quality and duration. Don’t forget they also offer a wide array of other features such as menstrual cycle or blood oxygen levels.

Garmin Instinct, Rugged Outdoor Watch with GPS, Features Glonass …

The USP of this watch is the multi-faceted discipline functions – it packs 80 different sport modes with metrics specific to each. Polar has been making heart-rate monitors since 1977, long before your mum got interested in getting her 10,000 steps a day. Its innovative products are used by elite coaches to track the performance of pros in practically every sport imaginable so it’s more than capable of helping you track down a new PB. Many of the proper trackers now look good enough to work within most outfits – black tie aside – and even the most Swiss of Swiss watchmakers are adding tracking technology weighty enough to challenge Fitbit to a foot race. De Guzman is a longtime health and fitness enthusiast who is interested in nutrition, diet, and mental health. He participates in endurance sports and cross-trains in several traditions of martial arts from Southeast Asia.

While you can use the Oura Ring without a subscription, you’ll be limited to the current day’s sleep, readiness and activity scores. If price is more important to you than features like dual-band GPS, Training Load and Training Readiness, the aforementioned Garmin Vivoactive 6 or make for great, cheaper alternatives. Training Readiness combines multiple metrics to give you a top-level score about how beneficial training is today. In practice, it helped me decide whether the day was a rest day, easy day or day to push myself.

Ticwatch Pro 5 Smartwatch

Technically, the Fenix 8 is slightly smarter in that it has an onboard voice assistant. However, it is also more than double the price and not what I’d consider a good value for the average athlete. Garmin has shored up the smarts in its watches over the past several years, and the Venu 3 series is one of the smartest (and most affordable) of the bunch. None of these features or metrics are locked behind a paywall, even if Garmin’s AI-powered insights and a few other expanded features are only available as part of Garmin Connect Plus ($6.99 a month / $69.99 annually). The Suunto Spartan range is up there with the most expensive, but with good reason. The sheer magnitude of tracking options makes it the go-to choice for weekend warriors and serious athletes alike.

And if you’re willing to spend $30 more (or $50 for the leather wristband), the Lily 2 Classic features Garmin’s contactless payment. In just a few years, Coros has gone from unknown entity to household name in the fitness watch world. Most notably, battery life is best-in-class—the Apex 2 outlasts Garmin’s Forerunner 965 by about 9 hours in GPS mode. And although the watch only comes in one size, it hits a sweet spot at 43 millimeters and has been a great fit for both our male and female testers.

Slim, Versatile And Easy To Follow

(You’ll need a phone on hand, however, as only one Garmin model has cellular connectivity.) Many Garmin devices also support offline music playback and come with a small third-party app ecosystem. Weight might not seem like a big deal, especially when you consider the small difference between a featherweight option like the Fitbit Charge 6 (30 grams) and a “bulkier” one like the Coros Pace 3 (39 grams). But when you’re wearing your fitness tracker all day, a heftier model becomes a lot more noticeable than you’d expect. But without the GPS and heart-rate monitors that make other brands’ smartwatches such vital exercise tools, the Skagen models are best for casual (good-looking) exercise.

Garmin’s high-end watches like the fenix 8 have a navigational feature called ClimbPro that shows the remaining distance for a section of uphill travel. Garmin watches also include pre-downloaded ski resort maps for 2000 ski resorts worldwide. Entry-level Garmin watches like the vívoactive 5 that include GPS but lack navigation often feature a back-to-start mode that allows you to use an on-screen compass to return to where you started recording without an on-screen map. Each brand has its own way of summarizing a night of sleep, but most use a scale of to rate the night of sleep while also tracking time asleep and sleep cycles. Garmin, as the leader in the field for training data and even coaching through the watch interface, has a few statistics that seem to be included across its newest watches, no matter how high-end it is.

Wearable

Inside the TAG Connected Calibre E5, it tracks heart rate variability (HRV), peripheral capillary oxygen, and even includes performance training plans tailored for running and golf. Fabric bands are great for casual wear, fitness tracking, and comfort-first users. The straps are lightweight, breathable, and soft against the skin, making them great for long wear or sweaty workouts.

Best non-wrist tracker

Even with regular use, you get a solid two weeks on a single charge, ensuring you’re powered through early mornings to late nights. Rugged smartwatches are built to survive hard knocks, rough weather, and long days off-grid. These picks are shockproof, waterproof, and packed with features for fitness and safety. Some fitness watches also come with built-in solar panels, which can go a long way towards keeping your watch running. Garmin’s Instinct 3 Solar is among our favorites in this category, featuring a lifespan of up to 40 hours in GPS mode and unlimited power in expedition mode. Of course, a watch’s ability to charge via the sun does depend on the intensity and duration of the rays, which makes a solar watch a great pick for sunny desert environments but not the best choice for socked-in mountain landscapes.

Q. How to Choose the Best Rugged Smartwatch

From our personal experience with Whoop, we love how it fits on the wrist. It is one of the more comfortable fitness trackers we’ve worn—the strap has a soft back, is woven with microfilament yarn, and can also be easily adjusted. Sure, your workouts are still a key part of what these devices do, but in addition they’re also tracking your sleep, heart rhythm patterns, blood oxygen levels, HRV, stress, and even caffeine consumption.

Power Source and Battery Life

For health tracking, you can monitor heart rate, blood oxygen, intensity minutes (how many minutes of moderate exercise you get per week), stress, hydration, respiratory rate, and menstrual cycles. Battery life in fitness watches varies significantly based on several factors. These factors include watch features, usage intensity, and power management technologies. Basic fitness watches typically offer longer battery life, ranging from a few days to several weeks, as they focus mainly on essential functions like step tracking and heart rate monitoring. Smart fitness watches, which include advanced features like GPS, streaming music, and notifications, generally have shorter battery life, often lasting from 18 hours to 5 days, depending on usage. Our top pick, Garmin’s Vivomove Sport Watch, stood out among the heart rate monitor watches we tested for its waterproof, comfortable design, user-friendly interface, and accurate activity tracking.

• Cardio-based activities like a treadmill run come with more detailed data.
• Plus, every Fenix 7 Pro model has a hands-free LED flashlight, an upgraded heart rate sensor, and an improved memory-in-pixel display that’s slightly easier to read in low lighting.
• Your voice is your command with the AMAZTIM M2’s integrated AI voice assistant.
• “The large, bright display and straightforward layout make it easy for me to get the information I need at a glance,” he says.
• Because people buy Garmins to last a long time, we also put special consideration on battery life testing.
• Furthermore, battery capacity, measured in milliampere-hours (mAh), varies among brands and models.

Garmin Instinct 3 Beta v10.30 Update: What’s New

For example, the COROS Apex 2 Pro advertises 75 hours in GPS mode (GPS + QZSS) and 45 hours with five satellite systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Beidou, QZSS), and 30 days for daily use without GPS tracking. Pretty much all fitness watches that include GPS, even without full navigational capabilities, include a compass. This allows for back-to-start navigation and basic orientation without service. GPS isn’t the only game in town when it comes to satellite navigation systems, and many new finance yahoo article fitness watches are integrating other global systems to increase fidelity in their location technologies.

Smart Watch Women, 1.85″ HD Fitness Tracker Call Function,

Most fitness trackers provide an estimated tally of calories burned that’s based in part on an estimate of your basal metabolic rate. Andrew Jagim, PhD, director of sports medicine research at Mayo Clinic Health System and the co-author of a study on fitness-tracker accuracy, pointed out that each company uses its own proprietary algorithm to calculate that number. Some rely on heart rate, for instance, while others factor in accelerometer data. Garmin’s lifestyle-focused Apple Watch alternative for active people, the Garmin Venu 3S is a smaller watch designed to look at home in the office as well as in gyms or on roads. With up to 10 days of battery life and an ob-board speaker and microphone to take calls on watch, it strikes the perfect blend of fitness tracker and smartwatch. In the watch world, there’s a ticker for everyone—whether you’re making power moves in the boardroom or chasing the next adventure.